engleski

Mental simulation of the illusory and the factual in negation processing: Insights from Croatian vs. English

Background: How do comprehenders process negative statements? Opinions vary. Some argue that a negative statement is more difficult to process than its positive counterpart because comprehenders start off with the representation of the positive state of affairs and then proceed to the (f)actual one (Kaup et al., 2007). Alternatively, the negative/factual state of affairs may not be more difficult as it can also be computed directly (Orenes et al., 2014). This debate has an additional layer, namely whether various language-specific structural cues lead to processing differences (Zhang & Vanek, 2021). One such cue is negative concord in Croatian and English. English only allows one negated lexeme per clause, while Croatian allows double negation (Zovko Dinković, 2013). To date, no studies have compared processing courses of different negation types in English vs. Croatian native speakers. This study builds on the assumption that linguistic structure can facilitate or hinder negation processing and thereby affect mental simulations amongst speakers. Methods: We manipulated the factual and the illusory in negation to explore native speakers’ mental simulations. We tested whether differences in sentential negation lead to differences in negation processing between languages, and between negation types within languages. We used an eye- tracking with combinations of pictures and audio recordings (N = 45/group ; see Fig.1). We manipulated Negation and Language, and measured: anticipatory fixations (first fixations & proportions of looks during auditory processing in the absence of pictures), and integratory fixations (proportions of looks after reappearance of pictures). To our knowledge, this is the first negation processing study utilising the anticipatory eye-tracking paradigm (Kamide et al., 2003). Results: Two sets of results emerged. First, crosslinguistically, we observed the greatest between-language difference (% of looks) in the processing of negative concord in Croatian (anticipation factual: M = 58, SD = 46 ; integration factual: M = 66, SD = 44) vs. the corresponding null quantifier negation in English (anticipation factual: M = 49, SD = 46 ; integration factual: M = 48, SD = 47). Double negation provided a comparatively more robust reduction of focus on the illusory in Croatian than in English (manifested as a steeper decrease in the orange slope in Fig. 2). Second, within languages, linear mixed effects models confirmed that fixations on the factual were significantly more frequent during anticipation and integration than on the illusory, for both language groups. LMM test results approached a significant interaction between negation type and fixations (β = 0.08, SE = 0.04, t = 1.86, p = .069). Discussion: We argue that negative concord provides an additional cue in Croatian that strengthens mental simulation and reduces focus on the illusory more than the null quantifier in English does. While overall fixation trajectories were comparable across negation conditions in English (single vs single cue), processing differences in the form of various divergence points were found in negation types in Croatian (earlier for the single vs later for the double cue). These time-sensitive insights from Croatian vs. English call for a finer-grained account of how negation is understood (Orenes et al., 2007) as they track the relative impact that various negation types have on supporting inferences of the factual over the illusory. Robust follow-up analyses are planned to establish whether divergence points significantly varied (Stone et al., 2011).

Negation ; Processing ; Cross-linguistic comparison ; Eye-tracking ; Divergence Point Analysis

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